Burning History: a letter from El Carmen, Peru

Peruvian singer Susana Baca making dinner. Pic by me.

In 1999, GQ sent me to Lima to do a story about the great Afro-Peruvian singer, Susana Baca. She was making a record with the producer Craig Street, for David Byrne's label, Luaka Bop. And she was recording the entire thing in her house. I got to stay at the house for a few days during the recording. I had never had such an assignment before, had only published one magazine story by then, and pretty much had no idea what I was doing. But I was fortunate because 1) GQ gave me a chance (Thanks, Jim Nelson! -- way back then a senior editor, now GQ Editor-in-Chief.); and 2) because everyone there at the house in Lima, including Susana, her band, her husband, Ricardo, and Craig Street, was incredibly kind and open. It turned out to be one of the greatest experiences of my life.

After I was done with my reporting, I flew to Ayacucho, the birthplace of the Shining Path, where I was struck down first with altitude sickness, and then with a voracious intestinal parasite. I spent much of my time in my hotel room eating Chips Ahoy cookies (the only thing that didn't seem to go through my digestive system in less than 2 minutes; I wonder, and worry about, why), drinking water, and watching the John Sayles movie Lone Star over and over again on the only English-language station I could find on the TV. 

But before heading to Ayacucho, I'd taken a road trip south to the village of El Carmen, Peru, to what is thought to be the birthplace of the glorious Afro-Peruvian culture that Baca had done so much to preserve and proliferate. At that time, I had never been to South America, and never before to a city that raged and burned quite like Lima, and it had been mind-bending for me in good and bad ways. 

The Susana Baca story turned out really nicely and appeared in GQ in the spring of 2000 (Estella Warren cover), but I don't think it is available anywhere online, so can't link to it. However, I remember the lede by heart: "Most of the time when an artist says "I recorded it at home," it means in a studio in the barn or on a 12-track in the basement. In Peruvian singer Susana Baca's case, it means in the kitchen, the hallway, the bedroom, the stairwell." 

Cotito on the gourd. Pic: me.

 
But this is the story of my trip to El Carmen.

Burning History: a letter from El Carmen

Too many days and nights amid the churning chaos of Lima had left me in a state of melancholy bordering on mourning. Accompanying me everywhere was an almost constant awareness of the ephemeral nature of what the city’s raw energy burned: gas fumes, garbage, people, peoples, history.

And so when my work was done in Lima, I left its pandemonium behind and headed down the Pan American highway, south through the brown coastal deserts of Peru. My destination was a bucolic, historic region in the state of Chincha said to be the cradle of Afro Peruvian culture. There I would hear the music of Peru’s slaves and their descendants, in its element and at its root. This music was what I’d come to Peru to write about. The hope now was that in Chinca I could witness the culture and tell everyone that I’d been to the source, to the watershed, and found it flowing.

Sounds good. But as we careen down the highway on a bright, beige summer day, there’s no denying my ulterior motive, my urge to flee Lima, my need to shed the amorphous fear and guilt the city engenders, before they morph into something unshedable. But no matter how far or how fast we drive the highway, death-haunted images of the hunger-smitten city refuse to abate: the breadth of its hillside poverty, the black darkness of its outlying streets at night, broken only by the occasional garbage fire, the heaping garbage on the beaches near Chorillos, the thick, brown, meringue-like foam floating on the ocean waves. The countless street urchins offering meaningless services for small tribute.

My guide is a fair-skinned, blondish Limeño named Xavier who is in nothing so Peruvian as in the recklessness of his driving. All along the wide road I see many small, white, wooden crosses dedicated to this highway’s dead and spend much of the three-hour drive sweating, clinging, saying many Acts of Contrition. At least a half dozen times I find myself wondering, as Xavier uses the soft, deeply grooved shoulder, and beyond, to pass sluggishly moving trucks or to avoid oncoming traffic, if tomorrow there might be one of those little white crosses dedicated to my memory.

Our first stop along the highway is in Cañente, where we sit on the town square and try vainly to blend in among the locals. The grounds (and some of the people) within the busy square are coifed near perfection: fenced off rose gardens, healthy fichus trees, blue-uniformed school children giggling on benches, a dapper old black man with silver hair, dozing. There’s a smartly dressed old lady with a sunken-in mouth wearing a thick sweater and wool stockings, soaking in the morning sun; a mud-caked, sun-baked lunatic insisting we give him something, anything; a beefy man selling lottery tickets; a red-skirted woman of the highlands with a small child; more Andean children on the make, wanting desperately to shine my boots or clean the clean windows on our car. The pressure of the beggar and the persistence of the enterprising children soon overwhelm us and so we push off south again along the scary highway to our destination: northern Chincha.

El Carmen
This part of Chincha is a three-hearted beast: there’s the quiet, low-slung Peruvian village of El Carmen with its deserted town square; there are the surrounding cotton and banana fields of what was once a colonial plantation ruled by the residents of the nearby hacienda, now the "Hacienda San Jose," a hotel, where we’ll be staying; and behind the walls of the hacienda lies the dun, sun-washed shanty town where live the mostly black, partly indigenous community who farm the small plots into which the hacienda’s vast acreage has been divided.

After turning off the paved road on our approach to El Carmen, we pass a crumbling adobe wall with a fading message stenciled on it, which translates roughly: El Carmen, noble district of a valorous race of color. Glorious land of sport. Always welcoming, happy, and courteous, receives you with open arms. Shortly we’re forced to stop for a herd of burros chasing after a herd of goats munching in the bush. Another 100 meters down the dirt and gravel road we encounter a group of three little boys, the fifth, sixth, and seventh black people I’ve encountered in Peru, playing on the sandy berm above the road. One, holding a toy gun made of pieces of colored two-by-fours, smiles, waves, then shoots us, somehow congenially.

We drive along the estate wall and come to a gate and near death in a friendly near collision with an exiting truck. The truck driver smiles, waves, and evacuates as we drive into the square of the grand old Hacienda San Jose, while Xavier mutters something in Spanish that sounds like “moron” or else “mort.”

The Hacienda San Jose
With some time to myself at midafternoon at this elegant, Colonial-period residence with its sprawling, red-tiled veranda, I wander. Attached to the big house is an 18th Century baroque chapel the size of one of California’s missions. I stand in the courtyard and admire its old bone-white facade, wither a little in the reflected heat and light.

I enter the darkness of the ancient church, kneel down to pray for forgiveness, but am first distracted by the spectacular intricacies of the towering altar carved from dark Colombian oak. Then by the intrepid altar-dusting of a member of the staff. Three Our Fathers. Feel only a tiny bit better. I’ve never seen bloodier Christs than those in Peru. The tension of Lima is still roiling within me, but I find things I like in this quiet: the constant moaning of invisible mourning doves; the musty mission smell a charming mix of dust and Endust, for this seems to be a lovingly kept place where the battle can only be lost.

Walking about the grounds, I hear children on an out-of-tune piano playing “Que Sera Sera,” see a lonely burro in the field, anthropomorphize a burro in a field by calling it lonely, go into the main building in search of agua mineral.

Evening. A quiet dusk except for one rooster crowing. Footsteps echoing on the tiles of the veranda, where I sit facing west ,watching fields of tall grass with a stray dog swimming laps.

The Hacienda San Jose began life in 1650 as a Jesuit monastery. In the 18th Century, it was ceded to the Salazars, relatives of a prominent Jesuit, who moved in, and the monastery became a hacienda, or what we would call a plantation. The 17th Century monastics had built catacombs to bury their dead. The ranchers later used the two kilometers of catacomb tunnel beneath the house to hide from pirates who’d landed at the port at Pisco about twenty kilometers west of here. Later owners of the hacienda built a tunnel leading from Pisco directly to their slave quarters, which the catacombs had eventually become. Tunnel transport was said to be a good way to keep the slaves disoriented: arrive squinting at San Jose, birds flapping wings in the trees. Esta noche a caged parrot in the courtyard screeching like one of Salazar’s men is whipping a recalcitrant slave. A horse and more burros in the field, one baby mule stiffly running in circles, kicking up dust. Darkness falling fast. If not a timeless scene, then one with very little of our time to it.

Dinner at the hacienda is much like other restaurant meals I’ve had in Peru, hearty but bland. We have a good bottle of Argentinean wine, though, and I try to let the alcohol, the night sounds and the night quiet and the distance from Lima settle over me so that I will sleep.

The ceiling in my room is at least 20 feet high. There’s an opening up there, like a kind of vent, and I’m fairly certain I’m sharing the room with at least one bat, who keeps to himself, as do I.

Over the Wall
Much as I knew I’d want to take pictures, I failed to grab my camera when Xavier came to my room the next morning and said, “Let’s take a walk and meet some people.” It’s regrettable because immediately outside the wall three women stand around a portable, glass-encased statue of the Virgin surrounded by yellow and red roses, while one of the women – according to Xavier – preaches to the other two. I only understand her when she begins repeatedly proclaiming the name of God, as in, “Dios, Dios, Dios, Dios.” We don’t stay to listen and instead walk on into the village past one sheep and three stray dogs with flapping nipples. We stop momentarily for Xavier to answer a question of mine and when I look back toward the women I see they have hoisted the statue onto their shoulders and are making a kind of procession – either impromptu or just unattended – through the main street of the village. One of the buildings they pass, the most colorful little one-story shack on the street, is the Pentecostal church. In 1999, the Pentecostals are a relatively recent presence in Latin America. They’re working hard to usurp the centuries-long hold the Catholic Church has had on the souls of this part of the world, and are having great success here and in Mexico.

Ignoring the procession are two well-dressed women who stand outside the door to one home in a posture and at a precise distance from the occupant that would indicate to me the passive-aggressive methods of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The women are holding little magazines for the household to see.

In the bright morning air, Xavier and I continue our walk beyond the hacienda’s back wall and into the one-road, mud bricked village of perhaps twenty families. This village of San Jose has a school, a day care center, an unpaved main street that is dusty except where it’s made muddy by urine: human, dog, sheep, goat urine. Quickly, a three-year old boy pops out of a dark doorway, his little piss-shooting dick in his hand. As we make our way along a well-worn footpath, immediately beyond the last of the finished houses, among the half-built abandoned ones, and between the adobe-walled fields of cotton of poor quality lined with a few banana trees, the garbage begins to mount. The flies thicken. The unmistakable scent of the feces of your own kind greets you aggressively. Along the road and on the edges of the cotton fields are disposed-of diapers bursting with runny baby crap, other, adult-like turds gathered into half-open pieces of paper. You keep thinking the stink will go away but it doesn’t. It stays exactly the same, no stronger or weaker than before, just persistent. Xavier, who admits to being a member of the wealthiest 5% of Peru, and who is an enthusiastic apologist for his lamented Fujimori, says this squalor is the direct result of the agrarian reform policies of the mid 1970’s. He utters what strikes me as the classic noblesse oblige argument: “When all of this land was owned by a benevolent rancher, he took care of these people. Then the land was taken away from its longtime owners, and a small piece given to each family of plantation workers, to make their own living off the land. And now look at them. For some reason, they don’t know how to take care of themselves. They have electricity and antennas so that they can watch television and listen to football games on the radio, but no sewers. Look at the poor quality of their cotton. But, it is easy to make them laugh.”

Later we go into a shack with a Coca Cola sign out front. It is intensely hot and I want a bottle of water. Xavier says they may not have any water for sale, but that the tap water at the hacienda, which is maybe 100 yards from the tienda, is safe to drink because it is well water. This might be true, but everything I’ve read about Peru says, above all, don’t drink the water. And anyway, I say, I want to buy something in there. Inside, the room is unlit. There is one glass case with bottles of Sprite and beer and Inca Kola. Xavier was right. There is no water. Off to the side of the room is a 10-year old girl doing her homework. We buy two bottles of yellow, syrupy Inca Kola and drink them standing there while the storekeeper goes in and out of the room and into the street trying to find change for the 10 sole bill I’ve paid with. As we wait, Xavier tells me the proud story of Inca Kola, how it was the only pop in the world that Coca Cola has been unable to usurp in local popularity, how it was the only yellow cola, and how it had a patent on its particular shade of piss yellow. Finally Coke came in and bought Inca.

While we are drinking and talking and waiting, the storekeeper’s second daughter, a beautiful and sweet six-year old called Genesis shows us I think every piece of homework she’s done all school year. A whole page of the letter L. A page of colored-in animals like dogs and pigs and sheep. A perfectly traced cat. Pages from a coloring book on the folklore tradition of Chincha. She keeps disappearing behind a curtain and returning with more sheets of paper. I suspect Genesis of being a Pentecostal.

Later, back again in the shanty town, in this San Jose -- that is, the urine-soaked, shit-strewn garbage dump behind the high walls of the gleaming Hacienda San Jose -- walking in the late afternoon, we stop so that Xavier may chat with the family of our El Carmen guide for tomorrow, Juan. I’m not privy to their conversation in Spanish and so am left to lean awkwardly against the front of their shack and look at them: one woman with a brown and broken tooth in the front of her mouth; a boy maybe 15, handsome, skinny, chest almost concave, shirtless in pleated wool trousers and gray sneakers. He is scratching the happy head of an energetic puppy who barks at everyone else but who wags his tail at the youngster. Otherwise the puppy seems to be freely ranging into any house he chooses in this little stretch of five or six earth-colored houses before which we stand or lean, as the case my be. Finally, there is a fat old woman in the group who when she is preparing to laugh first shifts her great breasts and her general bulk up and down several times prior to smiling, prior to sounding her giggle.

The next morning, again in the village behind the walls of the Hacienda San Jose, drinking Coca Cola with ice and talking to Xavier’s father’s driver who is here visiting the house of his sister (the broken-toothed woman from yesterday) and her husband, Roberto, I recall that I had come to El Carmen and San Jose not to educate myself on what’s happening here now, but only to witness the quaintness of it’s history. I think as I sit and listen to Xavier’s mysteriously stingy translation that the only music I’ve heard is some schmaltzy Latin pop by the son of Julio Iglesias (that latter day Spanish colonialist, type: cultural) playing over a tinny transistor radio. No guitars, no chekos, no quijadas de burros, no slave songs or dances.

Instead we sit in the cool, unlit living room and talk more of agrarian reform. Roberto owns five hectares of land one kilometer from this house. He grows only cotton. This year the price of cotton, which tends to fluctuate dramatically, is up. Turns out that a monument in the center of the main street honors Roberto’s father. He and one of his sons, not Roberto, are said to have been great goalkeepers. I photograph the whole group around the monument.

On our fourth day in San Jose we hear rumors of another white journalist in the area in search of a story similar to mine. That afternoon on the road to El Carmen we overtake a lanky, fair skinned young man walking. He turns out to be a journalist from Holland who’s been traveling Latin America and sending back the occasional dispatch. We pick him up and the three of us ride into El Carmen and sit smoking in the mostly empty Plaza de Armas. He tells us he is hot on the trail of some legendary Afro Peruvian musician I’ve never heard of. I feel ashamed of my own journalistic ineptitude, and try to cover this by giving him some of my contacts in Lima.

At night we head back to that burning city and everything feels like a bust except I’m still alive. For the ride back I’ve purchased a rosary which I do not show to Xavier but keep handy in my breast pocket. The slaves are out of Africa, the slaveholders long dead. The land barons have surrendered the land to the slave’s descendents. I recall a morning spent at the National Museum in Lima, following the emergence and decline and emergence and decline of progressively more accomplished civilizations, the final destruction of which is foreshadowed by the fact that all the writing on all the exhibits is in, and everyone around you is speaking, Spanish. The whole history of this nation, of this continent, is one of bloody metamorphosis. Soon I’ll be back in Lima amid fumes and poverty, music and traffic and chaos, amid all this passing human beauty of Peru.